Nobody Cares: PRS

Kamilah Hauptmann

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I hope Innula Zenovka will forgive me for crosspost replying to something in another thread on the topic of retraining people. I just find the overarching topic interesting.

Personally, I wish national politicians would stay out this kind of thing -- it needs people who know the area and understand its needs, so primarily the local community and local government at various levels,


with assistance from national agencies (but not politicians with simple, one size fits all, solutions, whatever their party).


Anyway, my first gut impulse there is on the issue of homelessness. Every so often in Canada you'll find a region, province, municipality, what have you will make an initiative to provide support. The surrounding regions either do nothing or provide bus tickets and the initial region finds its resources crushed like an apple under the tire of a jacked up Ford F-350 crew cab long box. And then there was the time an empathy black hole decided to reduce their social assistance burden by issuing bus tickets to the neighbouring province. (Alberta to BC) (It's an ongoing theme, and an understandable one given that there's just a small patch of the country that's not a deep freeze for a few months every year.)

So I agree that local coordination is best. I agree that national assistance is needed. I would argue that federal level enforcement and oversight is also needed lest the empathy void areas merely pork barrel the funds and rely on the good faith actors to carry the load.
 

Veritable Quandry

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Unfortunately here in the US, we have predatory on-line colleges offering much of our "retraining" programs with use of Federal financial aid in the form of Pell Grants and student loans. Our Department of Education is led by executives of for-profit schools and private lenders, ensuring that students can't shed their debt even if they get a worthless degree (or can't finish because of a lack of support from the finaid mills).
 
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Innula Zenovka

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I hope Innula Zenovka will forgive me for crosspost replying to something in another thread on the topic of retraining people. I just find the overarching topic interesting.









Anyway, my first gut impulse there is on the issue of homelessness. Every so often in Canada you'll find a region, province, municipality, what have you will make an initiative to provide support. The surrounding regions either do nothing or provide bus tickets and the initial region finds its resources crushed like an apple under the tire of a jacked up Ford F-350 crew cab long box. And then there was the time an empathy black hole decided to reduce their social assistance burden by issuing bus tickets to the neighbouring province. (Alberta to BC) (It's an ongoing theme, and an understandable one given that there's just a small patch of the country that's not a deep freeze for a few months every year.)

So I agree that local coordination is best. I agree that national assistance is needed. I would argue that federal level enforcement and oversight is also needed lest the empathy void areas merely pork barrel the funds and rely on the good faith actors to carry the load.
I hope Innula Zenovka will forgive me for crosspost replying to something in another thread on the topic of retraining people. I just find the overarching topic interesting.









Anyway, my first gut impulse there is on the issue of homelessness. Every so often in Canada you'll find a region, province, municipality, what have you will make an initiative to provide support. The surrounding regions either do nothing or provide bus tickets and the initial region finds its resources crushed like an apple under the tire of a jacked up Ford F-350 crew cab long box. And then there was the time an empathy black hole decided to reduce their social assistance burden by issuing bus tickets to the neighbouring province. (Alberta to BC) (It's an ongoing theme, and an understandable one given that there's just a small patch of the country that's not a deep freeze for a few months every year.)

So I agree that local coordination is best. I agree that national assistance is needed. I would argue that federal level enforcement and oversight is also needed lest the empathy void areas merely pork barrel the funds and rely on the good faith actors to carry the load.
Certainly, and I was talking about the specific case of making strategic decisions about how communities are to develop after the coal mine (or other key industry, but mining in particular) around which they grew has closed.

I don't like solutions whereby government decides what the solution is to be ("we will create new jobs to replace the old ones by helping to attract new investment in recycling (or whatever) to the area, and here's a budget and a bureaucracy to make it happen").

I'd rather the community had help exploring possible options they could see for the way they wanted the town to develop, and then look at ways, with government help and oversight, to make that happen.

The sort of decisions that need to be made can, to my mind, best be made by the people who have to live with the consequences, and who know their own town and neighbours better than anyone.
 

Kamilah Hauptmann

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I'm not sure now why I drew a parallel there. Probably due to local concerns. British Columbia has no shortage of ghost towns, however. But with Britain's population density the concept of a ghost town is likely very rare. *googles* Oh wow. (I'm afraid I'm just rambling here.)

Excluding abandoned medieval villages Wikipedia has a page for seven in England. There are a number more medieval villages abandoned. The criteria page to page is Wikipedia's usual not quite standard but there's a great many in BC, and that's just BC. But with population density it's doesn't seem equivalent to the problem in Britain. Especially when many of these towns were company founded in the first place.

Now in the cases of towns in the process of dying out... probably a different problem as well. Some remote points of BC could be measured in terms of "0.7 Englands from the next urban center." Plus mountain ranges.


Big.
Anyway, just thinking out loud.
 

Dakota Tebaldi

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Yesterday a federal judge ordered that Chelsea Manning be released from jail, where she had been held for the last 10 months. This comes a day after an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Manning.

Manning was released from military prison in 2017 after her sentence for leaking classified military information was commuted by President Obama. She found herself back in jail last year though, on a series of contempt charges for refusing to comply with a grand jury witness subpoena. In ordering her release, the district court judge stated that the grand jury whose subpoena Manning was defying had concluded, which mooted the subpoena and thus her contempt charge.
 

Brenda Archer

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Yesterday a federal judge ordered that Chelsea Manning be released from jail, where she had been held for the last 10 months. This comes a day after an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Manning.

Manning was released from military prison in 2017 after her sentence for leaking classified military information was commuted by President Obama. She found herself back in jail last year though, on a series of contempt charges for refusing to comply with a grand jury witness subpoena. In ordering her release, the district court judge stated that the grand jury whose subpoena Manning was defying had concluded, which mooted the subpoena and thus her contempt charge.

I hope this is finally the end of her being jailed.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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Old and busted: Russian troll factories are manipulating the American election from Russia.

Hot news: Russian troll factories are manipulating the American election from Africa.

 

Innula Zenovka

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As with Assange* it's the state revenging itself, rather than justice per se.

*that should get Innula going...
Pro-tip -- if someone defies a court order then judicial ire will inevitably follow, and she won't enjoy the consequences.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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Pro-tip -- if someone defies a court order then judicial ire will inevitably follow, and she won't enjoy the consequences.
As I've pointed out in the past in very much detailed length he did not, he was always in contact with the Swedish law enforcement authorities who refused for years to listen to him and take his statement, until the Swedish supreme court judged either put him finally on trial or drop the charges. And the charges were dropped short after he got arrested.

Assange is a political prisoner. In the context of Corona virus somebody mentioned the Lancet magazine, one of the most well known, influential and highly regarded medical journals in the world.

So considering the high standard of such magazines articles like the below exactly that Lancet magazine can be considered as massively peer reviewed and accurate:
End torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange

Just that nobody gets me wrong: I don't consider Assange to be an angel; but he's a human being having fundamental rights, which he's got denied systematically and constantly because he pissed off the wrong states, and that's the problem about it.

If human rights suddenly become optional this opens the door widely to despotism like in Saudi Arabia or in China.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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As I've pointed out in the past in very much detailed length he did not, he was always in contact with the Swedish law enforcement authorities who refused for years to listen to him, until the Swedish supreme court judged either put him finally on trial or drop the charges. And the charges were dropped short after he got arrested.

Assange is a political prisoner. In the context of Corona virus somebody mentioned the Lancet magazine, one of the most well known and highly regarded medical journals in the UK.

So articles like the below in the Lancet magazine can be considered as massively peer reviewed:

End torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange
I was referring to Chelsea Manning's imprisonment for contempt of court, for refusing to obey a subpoena. That's what a subpoena is -- an instruction from the court to do something, under penalty (sub poena) of something nasty if you don't.

Similarly, Assange knew what would happen to him if he broke his bail when the British courts granted it -- failing to surrender to bail is a criminal offence, and now that he's broken it once, no British court (and I doubt any court anywhere else) is going to grant it a second time, since the risk of his failing to surrender again would be so great.

As to the letter in The Lancet (letter, not article, and it's news to me that letters on non-scientific matters are peer-reviewed, though I'm prepared to be proved wrong if you can point me to anywhere in The Lancet's submission policy that suggests the letter would have been peer-reviewed), you will be as well aware as am I that torture is forbidden by the ECHR, so I find it rather puzzling that Assange's lawyers have not raised this issue if they feel there is any merit in it.

What to do about prison inmates, whether they are serving prison sentences or on remand, during this pandemic is, I agree, a very troubling question, but it's a problem that has to be solved for everyone who is in prison at present, not just Assange, since that's the way the law works.
 
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